Phantasmal Site > Comparison to Other Libs

How does Phantasmal compare to other MUDLibs?

That's a fair question. Naturally this page is quite biased, and more information should be sought before you're fully satisfied. The DGD mailing list is an excellent resource for this kind of question and I recommend it over my own personal opinion as author of Phantasmal :-)

For DGD, my current opinion is that the competition is between Melville and Phantasmal if you're building most of the game, and between 2.4.5 and GurbaLib if you need something that's pretty much already a MUD.

How does Phantasmal compare to Melville?

Melville and Phantasmal both provide player logins, objects, rooms, soulDs and basic descriptions. They both provide basic chat facilities, including a ChannelD.

Melville also provides in-MUD mail and bulletin boards where you can post and read messages. Its most compelling feature for most users, though, is the fact that its code is quite simple. Melville doesn't do much extra for you, but its functionality is straightforward, and its structure reflects that. Developers have been using it as a very good tutorial for a very long time -- it's one of the oldest DGD MUDLibs.

Phantasmal is designed for more expansion. It has a robust and well-populated help system, extensive OLC (online creation) facilities, several well-defined file formats for loading objects, extensive localization, and the ability to recompile the MUD on the fly. It has mobiles, and daemons managing its various objects. It's also based on the Kernel MUDLib, giving it a very stable and secure base to work from. Recent versions contain many more features than Melville, despite a few specific Melville features that they don't have.

Looking at a feature comparison, it's all over but the shouting. It remains to be seen, though, if developers will begin actually creating MUDs based on Phantasmal... Melville's compelling simplicity continues to win it converts, and Phantasmal is sufficiently different from other MUDs to be intimidating to new administrators. For the moment, neither of them are the basis of any known successful MUDs, though a few of Phantasmal's components have been used in Jay Shaffstall's excellent 'Electric Sheep' MUD.

How does Phantasmal compare to the Kernel MUDLib?

Phantasmal is built on top of the Kernel MUDLib, and provides services on top of it. The Kernel MUDLib inheritance and security services are provided nearly unaltered. The Kernel MUDLib is significantly worse than Phantasmal for providing a stereotypical MUD, but it's also cleaner, slightly more secure and more tightly written. It isn't possible to change at Phantasmal's rate and still maintain the extremely high code standards of the Kernel Library, but Phantasmal does a decent job on all these counts.

If you want to build on the Kernel MUDLib, Phantasmal makes a fine example of how to do so. You could also take Phantasmal components to use in your own library. Both Phantasmal and the Kernel MUDLib are public domain, so either one can be used or relicensed in any way whatsoever.

Much as the Kernel Library provides a base to build a MUDLib on, Phantasmal provides a base to build a MUD on. Some objects, like the User object, even have mostly the same interface in Phantasmal as in the Kernel Library. The Kernel Library provides services like inheritance, security and events to a MUDLib, while Phantasmal provides services like rooms, mobiles, containers, recurrent events and basic activities to a MUD. They're powerful in combination, but the Kernel Library can also be used separately.

For more information about building a MUD on top of the Kernel Library, check out this section of my main DGD site.

How does Phantasmal compare to GurbaLib?

GurbaLib has a large set of game features that Phantasmal does not have. They're not always polished and perfect, but they exist. Many features (guilds, classes) will never be provided by Phantasmal proper, but may be provided by games on top of Phantasmal. Some features, such as IMUD3 support, can't be implemented on top of vanilla DGD so Phantasmal will never have them. Features implemented by GurbaLib but not Phantasmal include: wearable and wieldable objects; FTP Daemon and IMUD3 support; Actions and Triggers; Message Boards; Races; Player and Site Banning; Vendors; Guilds; Aliases; Skill System.

Obviously, GurbaLib as described is more suitable for a stereotypical MUD than Phantasmal is. Phantasmal does have areas in which it can claim superiority. Phantasmal can rebuild in-place, and has a genuinely excellent help system. Its localization is extensive and GurbaLib's is nonexistent. Phantasmal has a good security model and a well thought-out design, both areas where Gurba does more poorly. However, for stereotypical MUD use Phantasmal simply isn't up to Gurba's feature list.

GurbaLib isn't based on the Kernel MUDLib, and runs on a modified DGD 1.1. This makes it problematic to follow current experimental DGD development. That may not be a problem for you if you don't want LWOs, atomicity, and other features from the last few years of DGD development.

As a standard out-of-box LPMUD, GurbaLib is probably the best currently available. It isn't as flexible as Phantasmal, nor does it show off many of DGD's features like rebuild-in-place, but it has a decent game already built. It's a fine reason to never again consider using 2.4.5.

How does Phantasmal compare to 2.4.5?

The 2.4.5 MUDLib is ugly and nasty inside, it hasn't been updated to newer DGD versions and it is very poorly suited to demonstrating DGD's impressive functionality. Nonetheless it is surprisingly prevalent. That's because it allows you to simply unpack-and-go to get a very basic MUD set up, as no other available MUDLib does. Since it's already usable as a game, it often wins over MUDLibs that have substantial start-up effort. It's also because it's old, old, old, so a lot of MUDs used it when there were no other choices.

2.4.5 isn't really comparable to Phantasmal. Most existing 2.4.5 MUDs started using it because it was the only thing available (or the most compatible with whatever non-DGD driver they ported from) and continued using it because it's painful to switch codebases. Phantasmal will need to exist another decade before it can hope to be such an entrenched solution.

Currently 2.4.5 has wearable and wieldable items, combat, food and drink, and other general gameplay elements over Phantasmal. Phantasmal has localization, OLC, full recompilation and help system over 2.4.5. Even when Phantasmal has extensive gameplay features, it still will not replace 2.4.5's biggest advantage, the fact that 2.4.5 has been around for a ridiculously long time and is the basis of many existing MUDs.

What about non-DGD MUDLibs?

You could look at the LDMUD server, but there don't seem to be any overwhelmingly good MUDLibs. And if you're going to build your own MUDLib from scratch anyway, why not use DGD? It's a better server than LDMUD.

Everything on Amylaar is quite outdated. So for lack of other LP-compatible drivers, I'd go for MudOS if you're looking at non-DGD platforms.

Probably the best non-DGD competition is the Lima MUDLib for MudOS. It's cleaner and structured better than TMI-2, and is more modern and more powerful than Nightmare, LDMUD or Amylaar. Lima provides a better example of a stereotype LPMUD than 2.4.5 or GurbaLib. It obviously doesn't have some of DGD's features like atomic functions or statedumps, but is overall a quite acceptable alternative in most respects. It's probably the best choice if what you want is an LPMUD like the other ones out there, but easier to maintain than 2.4.5.

Phantasmal doesn't currently compete seriously with Lima. Lima, like Gurbalib, implements a powerful and extensive set of game rules. Phantasmal does not. Phantasmal might more reasonably be seen as competing with MudOS -- the combination of Phantasmal, the Kernel Library and DGD are jointly similar in power and complexity to using MudOS by itself.

What About Skotos?

As of this writing, Skotos has not yet released their open-source offering, SkotOS 2.0. Until they do so, their library remains powerful but exclusive, and it's difficult to get permission to build with it. No significant documentation is publicly available.

When and if SkotOS 2.0 comes out, that may be a whole other kettle of fish.

Any Other DGD MUDLibs Out There?

There are a few miscellaneous things like Inferno, and the adaptation of LambdaMOO to DGD. They're in entirely different categories. They don't have enough in common with anything mentioned here to really compete with them.

There are several SourceForge MUDLibs in early development, and probably more than aren't on SourceForge. None of them have released much anything yet, but we can all wait eagerly to hear from them. Until they've released code, it's hard to judge them.

The Herator MUD Library hasn't publicly published their code, though there are a few interesting files that can be downloaded when their Subversion repository is up. I don't know what their schedule is or how they plan to publish. Their pages don't say. They seem to be using the LGPL license for their library.